Kala, by M.I.A. (CD on XL)

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Format:	CD
Label:	XL
Price:	£9.79
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What we say

Rating: ecstatic This record left our Brian feeling ecstatic.

Trying to review the new M.I.A. album at the moment but my head is too mashed to take on the sheer scale of what i'm hearing. So XL have the White Stripes, the Blues going back to the Mississippi to apologise for itself & wanking off to all the "greats" in the process. Excuse me while I gently yawn a pink lolly from my arse. Then they casually put out this fucking mental album by a woman who I believe is from Sri Lanka. 'Kala' is her 2nd big outing, named after her mother this time. And it really is just so fucking brilliant i can't review it any time soon but i have to. I told the boys i would and i'll do my duty. I feel like a schoolboy again. If Missy elliot can top this next year then i might explode. It's that Timbaland fella. He seems to be the Willy Wonka of popular music. No wonder the underground's such a miserable mess when this stuff is being aimed at the stars. Afro tribal fusion grazing with crunk/dancehall vibes & the sassiest infectious lyrics in the bloody world. Somewhere it meets visionary hip hop/future techno & stuttering dancehall all blasted through a glistening pipe in a hallucinogenic eco warrior haze. With people actually starting to realize there's still so much awful stuff going on in Africa at the moment, if this doesn't energise yer (mostly) white booty down there at least in spirit then you have NO soul whatsoever. This lass is the absolute diamond in the dung and even if everywhere else gives this album of the week, I honestly think Norman's should follow suit. x Brian Dangerover

What the label says:

M.I.A. is often held up as someone different, someone with ‘that’ special something and an unerring ability to always keep ahead of the pack, continually turning in music that sounds both exciting and fresh. ‘Kala’ will not change this viewpoint, it will only fuel it further.The majority of the record was made when she was supposed to be taking time out and travelling. When she ended up in Chennai, India, she spent weeks live recording drum patterns with local percussionists, writing new songs like ‘BirdFlu’ and ‘20 Dollar’, holed up in a studio used normally for Bollywood soundtracks. Subsequent trips found her writing and recording in Trinidad, Jamaica, Australia, Japan and briefly in the US, where she spent a New Year’s Eve in Baltimore with producer Blaqstarr before finding a studio to make ‘The Turn’ with him.So while her buzzed-about 2004 debut album, ‘Arular’, found her in the leftfield of both dance beats and Third World politics, rapping about her early life split between war-torn Sri Lanka and London’s council estates, ‘Kala’ has got M.I.A. out in the global street or ‘World Town’, as she envisions it in one song.‘Arular’ was a bedroom dancehall rocker that fire-wired an international fan base and appealed to plugged-in critics, ‘Kala’ is a different beast, it’s the beat of the street itself — the sound of roadside sound systems, taxicab transistors, DVD-wired dollar vans, motorbike couriers and parking lot pull-ups. It’s also the sound of M.I.A. digging in as both an artist and a producer. ‘Kala’ also features M.I.A.’s first guest artists: the Nigerian rapper Afrikan Boy who rhymes on the raving ‘Hussel’, a group of Aborigine adolescents, The Wilcannia Mob, who appear on the didgeridoo beat of ‘Mango Pickle Down River’ and Timbaland who crops up on album closer ‘Come Around’.